What’s happened to news? Since the creation of the Internet, smart phones and — most recently — the coveted iPad, it seems as though traditional news has been forced to back into a corner to make way for the entrance of blogs and pseudo-news sources. Websites such as Gawker and The Huffington Post are quickly establishing themselves as reputable sources of hard-hitting news, potentially injuring big-time players, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, in their attempts to be relevant during these changing times.

 

Let me be clear: The news is not dead, nor dying. In fact, it’s very much alive and is thriving to its fullest potential. The oral tradition of breaking news will continue to survive despite budget cuts and economic meltdowns. The problem is that we, as readers, are having a difficult time differentiating between what is and is not news.

 

The belief that news is slowly being nailed to the coffin is due to the uncontrolled amount of tabloid gossip seeping into the newsroom. In order to make both their advertisers and readers happy, editors are forced to assign stories that are no longer as innovative or relevant. Gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow, who was the first to report from the war zone, bringing ‘breaking news’ directly to the homes of American citizens.

Readers continue to salivate over breaking news, in hopes to satisfy their thirst to be enthralled and entertained by the media.

 

We demand our journalists to be objective, honest and relevant — creating a dilemma of what can be news and how it is presented.

We’ve become accustomed to pseudo-news: a couple of one-liners about health care and same-sex marriages embedded in a series of Lindsay Lohan mishaps and Mel Gibson tirades. How are we supposed to act as the faithful watchdogs of the media if we can’t even tell the difference between gossip and actual news?

 

In September’s issue of GQ’s ‘Letter from the Editor,’ Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson writes a humorous commentary on how the Web is changing the way he absorbs news. ‘I’m starting to worry a bit about what the Web and viral/mobile/news-aggregatin’ sites are doing to our sense of what is news and what ain’t,’ Nelson writes. ‘It’s cool that there are zillion more options for news, opinion and ‘tude besides your local boring newspaper (or taxicab) but why are so many of them starting to bleed together, one massive, churning, self-feeding bland-sphere?’

 

Nelson is right — it’s entirely OK to have an array of options of what we’d like to read as the news, but first, we must be given the opportunity to be presented with the choices of news that we can read. Without drawing a line of what is and isn’t news, we are beginning to put ourselves in a difficult situation where the lines blur too closely between entertainment and actual relevancy.

 

Angela Hu is a junior magazine journalism and English and textual studies major. Her column appears weekly and she can be reached at ajh01@syr.edu.

Published on August 31, 2010 at 12:00 pm